It's March, I built a sustainable wardrobe app

Being fair, this started as a game, something I wanted for myself. Are there other digital wardrobe apps? Yes, plenty, a lot of them have similar features, but none of them really had exactly what I wanted, and all of them required the same amount of effort in terms of me uploading my clothes (plus payment), so, with the free credits Lovable offered for women’s day, I decided to spend that Sunday seeing if I could get to something by myself. I did. Could I have paid 90€ a year for one and call it a day? Probably, most likely, that would also mean I will not end up using it as I expected. So this became a digital version of “why buy a sweater when I can spend 500€ on supplies and 500 hours and do it myself”.

After 10 hours nonstop, I got to about 80% of it. It was built in Lovable at first, using the Lovable Cloud during the free coding day. By the end of Sunday, I had “spent” 400 credits, most of them on unnecessary tests and tweaks. I imagine I could have done it under 200 if I had any idea of what I was going to get out of it.

The app itself has one premise: buy less, wear more. My ADHD makes me forget the things I don’t see. Until very recently, I lived my life with very few drawers at home (I still do), most of my clothes hang, but my shoes are organized away in boxes, and even if it’s only 2 drawers, and I fold my clothes in Marie Condo’s obsessive style so I can see them, I still do not. So I needed an archive.

I wanted to help me gamify my experience so I would not forget. If I get a goal to it, I will use it as I like to improve (call it dopamine hacking) and give me basic information on usage, costs, etc., plus reward me for my sustainable practices. While doing it, I thought of a good friend who would also benefit from it, and I shared it with her. She was obsessed, and because I was in a full rush, I ended up imagining more people using it, with free credits available, a built-in referral system, and tiered plans.

So there is that.

It was built in React. That weekend, I played with several features to see if this could sustain it. I added l18N and 3 more languages, and added several AI features using the Gemini API. By the end of that week, it had 10 registered users (most of them friends), not like I imagined this would be my breakthrough product. But it taught me a lot, and the most important thing is that it forced me to start again and to get into this spiral that goes VERY fast, and I somehow want to keep up with.

I shared it on a TikTok (55 people following, do not expect a promo here), and by the end of that week, 20 users were registered, so I realized this could be more than just a simple game, and it’s when it became an experiment. I am currently allowing free usage, even though AI usage has costs, as I want to test a tool with users to understand how much it would cost to maintain. I know getting people to use free shit might be easier, but that’s it. That’s what I want out of it.

You can learn more about this project, the technology used, and access it here. I have promised myself a couple of milestones:

• When it reaches 50 users, I will revise the React build, which is horrible for SEO, and I know better than that
• When it reaches 100 registered users, I will try to learn how to transform this into a mobile app.
• If it never does, I am happy using it by myself, and I use it daily.

Thanks to Vestiari I realized of the many other things I had on a list, tiny little ideas, nothing crazy, systems I have built in much more rudimentary ways for myself that either now could be allowed to exist or I had now the capacity to improve, so I took the dusk away from my personal Linear account, started brain dumping both on improvements to this single app and to all the stuff I would like to have and so far I could not and this project was born.

I was static, honestly, I have never felt so hungry, awake, and excited in a very long time. And as usual, I know this could last short, so I also had to create this project to try to keep myself on track and make sure I do them all (again, the domain hack).

I don’t know really way I am doing (a bit so tho), so I will be sharing it all, the mistakes, the wins, the numbers, the costs, the questionable choices and unknown information with the same initial Idea I once started a Travel Blog, because if not, I forget about all that and this is SO many inputs, SO many information, that I can truly not afford that.

If you see how this started, you will realize I will be happy even if i am the only one reading this, but if you want to join along feel free to subscribe :)